Worldweavers: Gift of the Unmage

by Alma Alexander

  “Woodling,” Magpie murmured with authority.

  A girl sitting in front of Magpie overheard her comment, and whipped her head around.

  “What? What’s she doing out of her tree?”

  “What on earth is she doing here?” Tess whispered.

  But that question was quickly superseded by the things that Signe was saying in that lilting accent.

  “A lot of our work will be done outside,” she said, her moss-green eyes somehow giving the impression that she was focused on every individual student. “We will be looking at environmental impact studies and reports on many different regions. But we also have at least three national parks within striking distance, as well as threatened areas close enough for us to investigate or even adopt and rehabilitate. All of that provides plenty of opportunity for honest-to-goodness fieldwork, which means you might have to give up the occasional weekend to your academic pursuits. In fact, I thought I’d start the school year off with a field trip. We’ll be spending the next week or so studying the temperate rainforest phenomenon, and then later we’ll go and investigate a real rainforest—a day-trip to the Hoh forest.”

  A murmur swept the class.

  “Background reading assignment,” Signe said. “Section Four, starting on page twenty-eight of your textbook…”

  After class, Magpie found herself the center of a small but fascinated audience.

  “The Quilcah elders, back at the reservation, claim that the forest was full of them,” Magpie was saying. “There was a time that Woodling wives were a prize. They were quiet and hardworking and they gave a man his space because they had to go back to their tree every so often….”

  “How often?” someone asked. “Every year? Every week? Every day…every hour? That would be a bummer.”

  “They could last for a month without returning, I think,” Magpie said.

  “And if they didn’t?”

  “They’d, I don’t know, wilt and die,” Magpie said. “I was told these stories years ago. I don’t remember it all. But in my great-grandfather’s time they were everywhere.”

  “But not anymore,” said a bronze-skinned boy with dark hair who looked very much like Magpie. “Even the tribal elders haven’t seen many of them in the last forty years, and younger folk barely remember them. A Woodling wife would be something that people would pay to see.”

  “She smells odd,” Ben volunteered. They all turned to look at him, and he flung out his hands defensively. “I don’t mean she smells, not like that. I can just…”

  “He has a nose for magic,” Magpie explained.

  “Yeah. And she smells…she almost doesn’t smell of anything. There’s just a whiff, like a memory of a scent. Like she once touched the source, but she’s been away from it for too long.”

  “Well, she can’t be a true Woodling,” Tess said. “You couldn’t employ one in any kind of real job. They’d be in and out of their tree, probably at all the most inconvenient times. And unless her tree was close enough, it would be impossible—she couldn’t get to it fast enough to survive.”

  “But what are they? Something like a dryad?”

  “I guess that’s one of their names,” Magpie said. “My people have always called them Woodlings. There are different kinds, you know—cedar Woodlings were common around here, they’re dark, and they sometimes look too much like us to tell who they really are.”

  “So what would Signe be?” someone asked.

  “Hard to tell. Remember, most of us have never even seen one. But I’d say something graceful and silvery and light—willow, maybe, or silver birch or aspen….”

  “Remember the Woodling wives?” Thea said. “Did they have children? Could she be half-Woodling, or maybe even less, with just enough of the blood to get Ben’s nose twitching but not enough to need a personal tree?”

  “Could be she’s a foreign Woodling, too, with that name and that hair,” Magpie said. “Even Faele get exiled sometimes.”

  “But if she was exiled, then what happens when she needs to get back to her tree?”

  “I’d have to ask my grandmother,” Magpie said. “I think the exiles were given a twig and a leaf of their tree, and that was all they would have of their home, all they could ever have again…but I think I’m mixing it up in my head now.”

  “Woodlings are Faele?” Thea asked sharply.

  “They’re related, I think,” Magpie said, glancing at her. “Why?”

  “Not important. I thought…she might be Alphiri, that’s all,” Thea said, keeping her voice carefully neutral. She could not possibly have explained the sudden unraveling of tension deep inside her, something utterly impossible to put in rational terms, the sense of having just been saved from an enemy who had breached the defenses of her fortress. The idea of an Alphiri inside the school had, for a moment, chilled her with a cold and gripping fear.

  Magpie gave her a long appraising look, but didn’t pursue it further.

  The discussion petered out, and Tess sighed, perusing her class schedule.

  “First day, and I’ve already got more homework than I know what to do with,” she complained mildly.

  “And cheating,” Terry said, his voice an almost perfect imitation of Mr. Siffer’s peevish tones, “will not be tolerated.” He grinned and the smile transformed his face, making him seem almost mischievous.

  Thea found herself grinning back.

  It was going to be a good year.

  2.

  The work piled up ever higher; the first week of high school disappeared in a flurry of new classes, classmates, and teachers. There were highlights—like that first field trip they took, during which Magpie kept half her attention on her work and the other half on trying to see if Signe ever disappeared from sight while a particular kind of tree was nearby. But Signe avoided classification, and all that happened was that Magpie managed to get herself messily involved with a couple of huge slugs she had been too distracted to notice, so she was nicknamed “Slugpie” for the rest of the trip.

  But soon the days began to shake down into routine, enlivened by Mr. Siffer’s arbitrary decisions as to what was covered by the syllabus on any given day and the increasingly complex problems posed by Twitterpat in the computer lab, where the students were starting to write programming code.

  For most of the students in Twitterpat’s class, intensive computer study was a fairly new thing. Computers had been used in business for nearly half a century, coming into use about the same time the Alphiri had made their presence known to humans. Personal computers in homes, however, had not become commonplace until the year that Thea herself was born, when the discovery that they were inert to spells and magic made magic-users across the world suddenly scramble to own one, in order to safely store otherwise potentially dangerous material.

  In ordinary schools such as the one Thea and most of the students in Twitterpat’s class had attended before they had come to the Academy, computer science was still considered to be very much an area of study that was of more use to those few people who were born non-mages. In circles in which Thea’s own family moved, it was considered to be perfectly adequate to be able to use just enough of a computer’s capability for it to be immediately useful, and although there were mages overseeing certain aspects of computer software, those that involved spell storage, the code for these programs themselves was written by and large by people who were not magic-users. It was almost considered beneath a mage to know precisely how his or her computer functioned. If there was trouble, one called a technician—until then, it was considered perfectly acceptable to be only just as knowledgeable about the home computer as was necessary to keep it running.

  The Academy offered a choice of foreign languages, from French and Japanese to Alphiri; for a moment Thea had been terrified that there would be an actual Alphiri teacher in charge of that particular course, but in fact it was taught by a Miss Eden, a tiny woman with snow-white hair and eyes like black beads who, apparently, had lived in the Alphiri ci
ties for a couple of years before she returned home to the human world. Rumor in the school had it that was what had turned her hair white in the first place. There was certainly enough strangeness about her to believe that. Thea wasn’t taking the class, but anything Alphiri had taken on a patina of dread for her and she avoided the whole issue. None of her particular group had chosen to take that option, either, but every now and then some of the students who were taking the Alphiri class would show off their new mastery of the language by breaking into its liquid syllables with each other, and it always made Thea’s hackles rise when she heard it spiking through the white noise of conversations in the school cafeteria.

  “You’d think that it wouldn’t be allowed,” she muttered, stabbing her chicken viciously with her fork.

  “What are you talking about?” asked Ben Broome, looking up.

  “That lingo,” Thea said, pointing with her fork. “Alphiri prattle. You’d think that it would be forbidden here.”

  “But the Alphiri aren’t magic,” Ben said. “Not really. They’re just…a different people. You might as well say that we shouldn’t learn French or German.”

  “They are, too,” Thea said stubbornly.

  “If you’re that strict about it,” said Magpie, “we couldn’t have Signe as a teacher. But she isn’t magic, not herself. She’s just…foreign.”

  Aside from its obvious lack of Ars Magica classes and perhaps a stricter emphasis in academic credentials than Thea was used to, school was school. But sharing her life with Magpie had been a different experience for Thea. For the first week or so Thea kept waking to Magpie’s gentle snores, but she had finally got used to having another person asleep in the room with her, and having a roommate soon ceased to be a novelty.

  Magpie’s occasional nocturnal excursions were less easy to sleep through. She was a self-appointed healer of wounded creatures, and every now and then she’d bring a patient into her room to nurse back to health. The first time it had been some small nestlings in a cardboard box in her closet; Thea had lain awake for almost an hour trying to locate the source of the chirping, before Magpie, who had been out, had returned and confessed.

  “You can’t tell anybody, I’m not supposed to have them in here. Mrs. Chen would take the poor things away and it’d be the end of them,” Magpie said.

  “Don’t be silly, Mag, she’s got ears, same as me,” Thea said. “If she comes in here and they don’t shut up, I don’t have to say anything.”

  “They know when to be quiet,” Magpie said.

  “What are they, anyway?”

  “Baby blue jays,” Magpie said. “I found them on the ground; they were nearly dead.”

  “Baby birds die, Mag.”

  “Not when I’ve got anything to do with it,” Magpie declared.

  Thea looked at her with a sudden speculative glance. “Healing touch?”

  “Nah,” Magpie said, but she had hesitated, just barely. “They just…live, when I get hold of them.”

  “You’d better not let me anywhere near them,” Thea said. “I kill potted plants, never mind animals.”

  Magpie cuffed her on the shoulder. “Oh, really.”

  “I’m serious, you just try me,” Thea said. “If you let me look at them, they might die of shock right then. It’s best if I…don’t know they’re there.”

  It was a statement of complicity, and Magpie understood it as such. She flashed Thea a grateful smile, and no more was said about the baby jays. But they were followed by other things: maimed squirrels, a rabbit with a broken paw that Magpie splinted with matchsticks, a young raccoon that Magpie rocked to sleep in her arms and which nuzzled at her with its pointed little snout like an affectionate cat.

  The familiar rustling of Magpie sneaking in yet another patient woke Thea from a light sleep one night in late September. The room was dark except for a wash of moonlight through the window; the curtains were open to a sky that was crystal clear with the first cool touch of autumn.

  “What is it now?” Thea whispered a little crossly in the general direction of a moving shadow tucking something small and squeaking into a cardboard box in the corner of her closet. A mouse maybe. Or a bat.

  “Shhh. Go back to sleep,” Magpie commanded.

  But the moonlight was in Thea’s eyes, and she propped her head on her hand, staring out at the sky.

  “Senic’ta,” she murmured. “Achievement and success. Harvest Moon…”

  Magpie straightened. “What was that?”

  Thea shifted her weight to turn and look at her roommate. “What was what?”

  “I haven’t met many people outside the reservation who know that the full moon has a name,” Magpie said carefully.

  “I learned,” Thea said, “from a tribal elder.” She sat up, reached for the top drawer of the dresser beside her bed, and rummaged in the moonlit shadows inside. Her fingers found the three feathers of her necklace and closed around them. She hesitated, then hauled out the necklace. “I never wear it where people can see…but he gave me this.”

  Magpie padded across the room, her bare feet making almost no sound on the carpeted floor. She perched cross-legged on the edge of Thea’s bed, reaching for the necklace, and fingered the feathers curiously.

  “There’s ancestral magic in this,” Magpie said. “These things stand for something. They can be used by those who know how. I thought you were supposed to be a magidim, that you couldn’t touch this stuff—isn’t that why you are here?”

  But Thea answered with a question of her own. “If you are supposed to be such a magidim, how come you can sense that it’s ancestral magic at all?”

  “I went through the rites,” Magpie said. “I went through all of them. I was even sent out on a guardian spirit quest, and lived in the wilderness by myself for a week waiting for my guardian to call my name—but neither animal nor tree did, or perhaps they all did and I was deafened by the cries. Either way, when I came back, they told me that magic ran through my fingers, that I could not hold it, that I had no guardian, that I would never be a medicine woman.”

  “Is that what you wanted?” Thea asked softly.

  “All the women of my family have been,” Magpie said, her voice small and sad. She fingered the feathers, paying out the leather thong of the necklace between her hands. “Raven—for wisdom, I presume. Eagle…for pride?” she questioned.

  “For courage, Cheveyo said.”

  “Cheveyo.” Magpie rolled the word on her tongue, tasting it.

  “The Southwest,” Thea said helpfully.

  “What tribe?”

  “Anasazi.”

  Magpie sat up and shot her a look full of astonishment. “The People of the Light? The Old Ones who vanished? Where on earth did you find one of them? I thought they were all dead.”

  “It wasn’t a place,” Thea said carefully. “My father…I had a Pass. I went…I went back.”

  In the shadows, Magpie’s jaw dropped. “You time-tripped? Your father must have more influence than you can possibly know—do you have any idea how expensive those Passes are?”

  “I’m a Double Seventh,” Thea said, letting her head fall back into the pillow and staring at the ceiling. “I guess they thought it was worth any price to try and wake whatever it is that was asleep inside me.”

  “And you agreed to go? Just like that? I would have been terrified.”

  “When my father left me there,” Thea said, “I was.”

  “But you went anyway,” Magpie said, stroking the eagle’s feather that she held across her palm. Eagle, for courage.

  “There wasn’t really a choice. And anyway, after…”

  “Did it work?” Magpie asked softly.

  “It showed me a different sky,” Thea said after a few moments of silence. “There are many worlds, not just this one. And there are many choices within those worlds. It brought me here, in a way. Before I went to Cheveyo, I hated the very idea of coming to this school….”

  “Few people want to come here,” Magp
ie said.

  “Yeah, but with me it was always more than one magidim child of a magical family,” said Thea. “The way I saw it, if I came here I wasn’t just a black sheep, I was the black sheep, the one who could never be redeemed.”

  “And after?”

  “After…that last day, back on the mesa, Cheveyo gave me that third feather, the turkey feather as a reward for learning what patience I could. He told me to go home and pick my own battlegrounds for the battles I’d have to fight. After that, coming here didn’t seem like a defeat anymore. It was more like I had picked my battlefield.”

  “Without magic? In a world that depends on it?”

  “I spent a very brief while in a world that flowed with it,” Thea said slowly, “and there…I was different. Things were different. Light was different. It let itself be plucked from the sky like ribbons, and it could be woven together like a braid.”

  There was awe in Magpie’s face and a little envy. “I wish I could have seen it.”

  She handed the necklace back without another word. They would keep each other’s secrets.

  The new patient in Magpie’s animal hospital turned out to be a mouse, a tiny, timid creature that barely stirred in its nest of shredded paper in the cardboard box. It had been there only a few days before Signe announced another field trip and Magpie had to scramble to make arrangements for its care while she was away. It was a full weekend this time, with the class divided into teams mapping out the ecological profile of a river mouth, a place where freshwater met salt and where creatures shaped by two sets of very different circumstances met and mingled. By the time the class returned to the school, it was fairly late on Sunday night. The mood should have been relaxed and laid back. Instead, the place was ablaze with lights. Students hung out of residence windows, calling to one another, and the administration building was lit up like a Christmas tree.

  “Something happened,” Signe said in her soft accent as she shepherded her charges off the school bus. “Please gather your things and go directly back to your rooms. No sense in adding to the commotion.”

  “What’s going on?” Magpie demanded of the first person she met in her residence hall.